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Said Douglas Southall Freeman, the noted Southern historian: "There were two abolitionist movements, the Civil War movement and Mrs. Roosevelt's movement to abolish segregation. The South is too much influenced in its treatment of the dividual Negro by the ignorance of the mass But the North is too much misled the ability of a few conspicuous Negroes. Mrs. Roosevelt has been hopelessly misled because she has seen only the best. The South is going to keep the line drawn between civil rights and social privilege. Civil rights should be recognized; social privilege is a matter of individuals. The South is going to keep that line drawn and that's all there is to it."
Wrote Geoffrey Gorer, British anthropologist and journalist, in the Georgia Review: "They are haunted by fear of rape; but though this is mostly envisaged in the crudest physical shape, it is probably a second spiritual violation which they dread even more. Terrified of being overwhelmed by violence, they use violence and the threat of violence to avert this disaster."
That was why the voice of Strom Thurmond, with its counterfeit arguments for states' rights, and the voice of his cousin, Georgia's "Hummon" Talmadge, with its white demagoguery, were listened to and generally, if not unanimously, applauded in the Southland. These were the voices of the apologists and the defenders.
Measure of Emotions. Thurmond claimed that he might win as many as 140 electoral votes. This was grossly exaggerated and he knew it. By the best expert reckoning, he would not get North Carolina, which was cool to all the candidates and coolest to a third-party candidate. He would not get Arkansas, although he might have enough strength there to spoil an outside chance for Dewey. He would not win Florida, Kentucky or Virginia, but he might get just enough there to give those states to Dewey. He was a fair bet to win Georgia and Louisiana, a very good bet to win Alabama, and a sure thing in his own state and in Mississippi. The popular vote which he polled would be a partial measure of the South's emotions and a measure of the extent of the Southern political revolt.
That revolt could be dated roughly from October 1947, when President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights dropped a match into the dry and prickly underbrush of Southern pride and fear. Franklin Roosevelt had always been careful to keep any such brush fires from spreading. He had imposed FEPC in 1941 by executive order, as a temporary wartime measure, which had angered the South. The South had flared up over Mrs. Roosevelt's well-meaning efforts on behalf of the Negro. But F.D.R., who did more to impose federal authority on the states than any man since Lincoln, had known how to mollify Southern politicians. His portrait hangs in Strom Thurmond's office alongside a blank space where Harry Truman's portrait once hung.
The Civil Rights Committee flatly recommended outlawing the anti-Negro practices of the South. Such fiery Southerners as Fielding Lewis Wright, governor of Mississippi, forthwith raised the cry of secession—from the Democratic Party, not the nation. When President Truman urged Congress to enact his committee's recommendations into law, the outcry could be heard from Charleston to Little Rock.